Everything old is new again...
on
Rugged Laptops
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· Score: 3
The first ever clamshell type portable computer was the GRiD Compass, a ruggedized computer with an alloy case and bubble memory (no moving parts.)
Since then, GRiD has continued making ruggedized laptops, including Tempest models for the military. There are other manufacturers out there as well, including the Rocky and Terradat laptops.
Personally, I plan to put a GRiD Convertible (identical to the AST PenExec) to work as the navigation and journal-keeping system in my 1959 Land Rover 109". It's not ultra-rugged, but it will do until I can afford a truly rugged machine.
P.S., that trick of driving over something isn't as impressive as it looks -- you get about 1/4 the vehicle's weight, which is evenly distributed over the entire area of the tire meeting the ground -- say 40 or so square inches (6" x 7"), so even my Rover, fully loaded, would only put about 25 pounds per square inch of pressure on the laptop.
The memory issues are with the GUI and browser -- but would a windows box require any less?
I recently bought retail (but cheapie) a motherboard with on-board IDE/Floppy/Serial/USB/Parallel, Cyrix P-266, 32MB of RAM, a cheapie 2MB video card, and a 32x CD-ROM drive for $155 including tax. It runs Linux and X just fine.
Add a case/PS/keyboard/mouse for another $50 and a 1GB hard drive for $50 and you've got a full system ready to hook up to a TV for about $250 at retail prices. Cut that in half for wholesale (or less!) and you've got a very affordable set-top box.
Heck, you wouldn't even need that big a hard drive -- send out your AOL CD's and let them boot off of that. The user wouldn't need to worry about screwing up the config, and updates would just mean putting a new CD in the drive and rebooting. All the configuration work would be done by AOL so the user wouldn't have to know a compiler from a cappucino.
It wouldn't have to be AOL, though. Anyone could do it -- just set it up so the user puts in their logon info and dial up # and sell it for general use.
The difference being that in this country (in theory, at least) the psychotics are free to go on being as psychotic as they like, so long as they don't infringe upon the rights of others to be non-psychotic.
(I'm a psycho, he's a psycho, wouldn't ya like to be a psycho too? be a psycho, yes be a psycho...)
You got most of my uber-heroes -- Grace Hopper, Alan Kay, and Doug Englebart. Not saying they are the most important or anything, (though they're all pretty damn important!), they're just the ones who were/are significant to me personally.
Alan Kay is my personal hero too (and can you believe I went and left the digital camera behind when I knew I might have a chance to get a picture with him? (Let alone have him autograph my Xerox PARCFrisbee!)!) but you may want to check out a little more history before giving him all the credit. 8^)
Some of the ideas and innovations you mentioned should rightly be credited to Douglas Englebart. They worked together, and Englebart wasn't the only one on the team, but the work at PARC came after the work done in the late 60's at the Stanford Research Institute.
He explains why it's such a shoddy job... He did it in one day doing his research on the web. Do you believe everything you read on the web?
(I know a web page where a supposedly knowledgeable person tells a reputable interviewer that the Gavilan was the first laptop computer. (Not even close.))
And contrary to popular opionion, the MITS machine was not the first PC. (Not even close.)
Furthermore, he left out all kinds of important milestones:
Doug Englebart and co's work with the mouse, user interfaces, and more (1969)
The Xerox Parcinnovations, including GUI's, ethernet, laser printers, and more (mid-70's)
Dynalogic, Kyocera, GRiD, Sharp, and more, who gave us portable computing as we know it (early 80's)
There are plenty of others, of course. Some of the names he left out -- Englebart, Metcalfe, Kay, Berkeley, Sutherland, and so on, are equally, if not more, important than the names on his list.
Sheesh... I remember playing Castle Wolfentstein and connecting to BBS's at 300bps with an acoustic coupler.
I had a VT-52 terminal and a 300bps modem, and I was hot stuff. That was in addition to my 8-bit Atari and Altos CP/M machine. sigh Those were the days!
They've been around for ages, and are a really good business; if you have a chance to support them by buying one of their CD's, do so. It will help pay for this FTP site.
Good businesses like this deserve to get your business.
Okay, I'm a linux newbie, so maybe I shouldn't have been able to do this, but I set up my 8.4GB hard drive with a 10mb boot partition, 100MB swap partition, and a 6+ GB partition for / under linux. (The rest is to play with win95 one of these days.)
Didn't know I couldn't do it, and S.u.s.e 5.3 and 6.0 didn't complain. Maybe ignorance really is bliss.
So, how many people really run around carrying a concealed weapon anyway? If you do, and you have a legitimate reason and/or a permit, no problem.
If you don't have a permit and/or justification, then you probably shouldn't be carrying. (You might just be the reason for this sort of thing in the first place.)
Me, I don't carry anything more dangerous than a Swiss Army knife anymore, so I'm not worried. I have nothing to hide.
First, what they did should have been unthinkable. Someone, somewhere, failed those kids. And they made a really bad choice.
(Note that kids don't always have the experience necessary to figure things out on their own. Heck, a lot of "adults" don't either.)
That the torment was not valid justification for the killing does not mean that the torment doesn't happen, or that it is not a problem. It does and it is. It needs to be addressed.
Teachers, as hard as they may try, are often faced with uncooperative -- or even hostile -- administrators, politicians, and parents. Further, being grossly underpaid (would you quit your $100K/year job to work 14 hours a day taking care of 30 kids for $30K?) means that teachers are either really dedicated or really bad. There are far too few of the former.
Still, it's not the job of a teacher to tell kids that violence is not a good solution, or that one should accept others, regardless of their differences. Values/Morals/Etc. like that are the providence of the parent. (Would you want me to teach your kids right and wrong?) Unfortunately, not only do many parents ignore their duties as co-educators, quite a few do teach violence and hatred to their children.
Also, people need to realize that if they want to have a child (or children) it means 18+ years of hard work and self-sacrifice. You can't just quit when it gets boring or unpleasant.
As to my own High School experiences... I attended my 10 year anniversary a while back. I was amazed when one guy came up to me and very sheepishly apologized for having beaten me up all the time. I honestly didn't remember him. So we chatted a bit. He's a CHP, I make $100K. I don't worry about it. 8^)
In 6th grade, I used to get beaten up regularly by a couple of girls. (Yeah, it's true.) Later on, I ran into one of them again. She was in the swim class I was teaching. She was petrified of the water. I resisted the urge to hold her underwater. But I thought about it! 8^)
Yeah, I never had a real girlfriend in HS. Now, however, I could buy a fancy car and schmoozie clothes, and still have money to buy a bimbo(s) a fancy dinner. Instead, I buy old computers, own (most of) a house in San Francisco and am getting married next month.
So, as has been said before, Go with the flow. You'll get through it, and then the good times will begin. Eventually, the jerks that beat you up now will be polishing your car for you. Beauty and strength are fleeting; intelligence counts.
"We'll learn easily enough how to tell when someone is "on-line" or "off", not by the equipment"
Perhaps what they need to do for production models is add a little red LED to one corner -- like movie cameras and such.
In any case, I gotta have one! (Can you just see it: "No, ma'am, I wasn't staring at your chest, I was surfing the net. Honest!" 8^)
It's not the only security hole...
on
The eBayla Virus
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· Score: 1
I've got one that I've been meaning to find the time to try that relies not on Javascript, but on user stupidity... I'm sure there are plenty more.
In any case, I rarely have Javascript enabled (I've yet to see any use for it that makes it worthwhile, and plenty that make it a nuisance) and can't possibly imagine why an auction item would require Javascript to describe it.
The obvious solution to eBayla is to disallow Javascript in auction descriptions -- unfortunately I think the folks at eBay are too busy counting their money to actually do something to make the system better.
I just ordered the cheapy set of various distribs CD's from Linux Mall so I could play with (among others) Red Hat.
I guess I'll have to order the $1.89 Red Hat 6.0 once it comes out.
Is this consistent with common carrier status?
on
ISP Sues Spammer
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· Score: 1
It's not the content of his messages that is the root of the suit, but the quantity thereof, and the ill effects ("loss of business") that resulted from his actions.
You can use the phone to talk about how bad the phone company is, even to make plans to blow up the local office. No worries. But if you actually carry out that plan...
Or, look at it this way: you pay for a certain amount of service. You use way more without paying for it. Your abuse causes other customers to lose access. You cause your provider to incur significant costs to clean up the mess. You are liable, regardless of what you used the excess services for.
I paid for a service. I had no choice in vendors, because NSI was given a governmentally approved monopoly. I can live with this; it was a necessary evil.
Now, however, according to the article at http://www.news.com/News/ Item/0,4,0-35228,00.html?st.ne.fd.mdh you plan on selling this data that I provided to you with the expectation of privacy. I hereby serve notice that if you sell my information to anyone at anytime, I will file suit immediately.
QBasic was a good choice for a couple of projects that I wanted to do. I needed a language/environment that:
would run on older machines
was quick and easy
that I knew fairly well
allowed for subroutines/functions
#1 meant MS-DOS, eliminating VB, Java, etc. #2 and #3 eliminated C, Perl, etc. QBasic was available, I knew it, you can do reasonably structured programming, and so on. It fit.
Since then, one of those projects has since been ported to Perl as a CGI script, but the code remains much the same.
Anyway, I'm not ashamed of my choice; It's a quick and easy language to work with, and fits the bill. There are no bad languages, only bad programmers. 8^)
And before you laugh at me for being a COBOL programmer, keep in mind that I made a ton of money last year, working from home in the buff. So there. 8^)
In what language are these lines being written? I wrote an awful lot of COBOL code last year, much less in BASIC, Perl, etc. COBOL requires a *lot* more lines of code to do the same tasks as other, more terse languages.
This:
SUBTRACT ONE FROM WS-NUMBER-OF-CREDITS-REMAINING.
MOVE WS-NUMBER-OF-CREDITS-REMAINING TO WS-DISPLAY-CREDITS-REMAINING.
Freudian slip... That should be Linus Write-Top, not Linux.
P.S., Don't forget to check out the Vintage Computer Festival if you're interested in computer history (which, of course, has a direct bearing on the future of computers.)
First off, if you go to the OJR home page, you can get to the actual article; their internal links seem to be a little screwy.
I am proud to have in my collection Several significant tablet-type computers: the GRiDPad, the GRiD 2260 and 2270 (aka Convertable), Amstrad PDA600, a Telepad 3, and (soon) a Linux Write-Top.
For more on the history of pen-computing, see:
probably the best collection of pen-based computers in the world (though not yet documented online)
some valuable info on the history of pen-based computing
While I love books, and have hundreds (if not thousands), I have long felt that the advantages of reading electronic-based information has definite advantages -- the same ones we have come to take for granted with the web and other electronic references. (Things like hyperlinks to related material, in-line definitions, multi-media, and so on.)
In addition, the easy, familiar format of things like the GRiDPad, CrossPad, etc. lend themselves to quick replacement of the traditional pad of paper for note-taking, surveying, and other data entry. The ease of integrating remotely gathered data into centralized databases/references will ultimately make such devices commonplace.
In short, technology such as the WebPad, e-books, and CrossPad will be augmenting more and more everyday tasks, from taking notes in meetings, to compiling grocery lists, from street corner surveys to reading the latest news while climbing the stairmaster at the gym.
P.S., if anyone has examples of early tablets (such as those from Go, Momenta, Motorola, AT&T, etc.) or other older portable computers they want to find a new home for, please feel free to contact me!
Slashdot Mirror
Since then, GRiD has continued making ruggedized laptops, including Tempest models for the military. There are other manufacturers out there as well, including the Rocky and Terradat laptops.
Personally, I plan to put a GRiD Convertible (identical to the AST PenExec) to work as the navigation and journal-keeping system in my 1959 Land Rover 109". It's not ultra-rugged, but it will do until I can afford a truly rugged machine.
P.S., that trick of driving over something isn't as impressive as it looks -- you get about 1/4 the vehicle's weight, which is evenly distributed over the entire area of the tire meeting the ground -- say 40 or so square inches (6" x 7"), so even my Rover, fully loaded, would only put about 25 pounds per square inch of pressure on the laptop.
The memory issues are with the GUI and browser -- but would a windows box require any less?
I recently bought retail (but cheapie) a motherboard with on-board IDE/Floppy/Serial/USB/Parallel, Cyrix P-266, 32MB of RAM, a cheapie 2MB video card, and a 32x CD-ROM drive for $155 including tax. It runs Linux and X just fine.
Add a case/PS/keyboard/mouse for another $50 and a 1GB hard drive for $50 and you've got a full system ready to hook up to a TV for about $250 at retail prices. Cut that in half for wholesale (or less!) and you've got a very affordable set-top box.
Heck, you wouldn't even need that big a hard drive -- send out your AOL CD's and let them boot off of that. The user wouldn't need to worry about screwing up the config, and updates would just mean putting a new CD in the drive and rebooting. All the configuration work would be done by AOL so the user wouldn't have to know a compiler from a cappucino.
It wouldn't have to be AOL, though. Anyone could do it -- just set it up so the user puts in their logon info and dial up # and sell it for general use.
This could be a real market...
(I'm a psycho, he's a psycho, wouldn't ya like to be a psycho too? be a psycho, yes be a psycho...)
Some of the ideas and innovations you mentioned should rightly be credited to Douglas Englebart. They worked together, and Englebart wasn't the only one on the team, but the work at PARC came after the work done in the late 60's at the Stanford Research Institute.
Perhaps there should be at least one mandatory preview of each comment? (I meant to preview it, honest!)
(I know a web page where a supposedly knowledgeable person tells a reputable interviewer that the Gavilan was the first laptop computer. (Not even close.))
And contrary to popular opionion, the MITS machine was not the first PC. (Not even close.)
Furthermore, he left out all kinds of important milestones:
There are plenty of others, of course. Some of the names he left out -- Englebart, Metcalfe, Kay, Berkeley, Sutherland, and so on, are equally, if not more, important than the names on his list.
To find out more [plug:] check out the Vintage Computer Festival or my site.
This guy did a bad job of research resulting in another incomplete and misleading web page.
Sheesh... I remember playing Castle Wolfentstein and connecting to BBS's at 300bps with an acoustic coupler.
I had a VT-52 terminal and a 300bps modem, and I was hot stuff. That was in addition to my 8-bit Atari and Altos CP/M machine. sigh Those were the days!
Good businesses like this deserve to get your business.
Didn't know I couldn't do it, and S.u.s.e 5.3 and 6.0 didn't complain. Maybe ignorance really is bliss.
If you don't have a permit and/or justification, then you probably shouldn't be carrying. (You might just be the reason for this sort of thing in the first place.)
Me, I don't carry anything more dangerous than a Swiss Army knife anymore, so I'm not worried. I have nothing to hide.
(Note that kids don't always have the experience necessary to figure things out on their own. Heck, a lot of "adults" don't either.)
That the torment was not valid justification for the killing does not mean that the torment doesn't happen, or that it is not a problem. It does and it is. It needs to be addressed.
Teachers, as hard as they may try, are often faced with uncooperative -- or even hostile -- administrators, politicians, and parents. Further, being grossly underpaid (would you quit your $100K/year job to work 14 hours a day taking care of 30 kids for $30K?) means that teachers are either really dedicated or really bad. There are far too few of the former.
Still, it's not the job of a teacher to tell kids that violence is not a good solution, or that one should accept others, regardless of their differences. Values/Morals/Etc. like that are the providence of the parent. (Would you want me to teach your kids right and wrong?) Unfortunately, not only do many parents ignore their duties as co-educators, quite a few do teach violence and hatred to their children.
Also, people need to realize that if they want to have a child (or children) it means 18+ years of hard work and self-sacrifice. You can't just quit when it gets boring or unpleasant.
As to my own High School experiences... I attended my 10 year anniversary a while back. I was amazed when one guy came up to me and very sheepishly apologized for having beaten me up all the time. I honestly didn't remember him. So we chatted a bit. He's a CHP, I make $100K. I don't worry about it. 8^)
In 6th grade, I used to get beaten up regularly by a couple of girls. (Yeah, it's true.) Later on, I ran into one of them again. She was in the swim class I was teaching. She was petrified of the water. I resisted the urge to hold her underwater. But I thought about it! 8^)
Yeah, I never had a real girlfriend in HS. Now, however, I could buy a fancy car and schmoozie clothes, and still have money to buy a bimbo(s) a fancy dinner. Instead, I buy old computers, own (most of) a house in San Francisco and am getting married next month.
So, as has been said before, Go with the flow. You'll get through it, and then the good times will begin. Eventually, the jerks that beat you up now will be polishing your car for you. Beauty and strength are fleeting; intelligence counts.
Perhaps what they need to do for production models is add a little red LED to one corner -- like movie cameras and such.
In any case, I gotta have one! (Can you just see it: "No, ma'am, I wasn't staring at your chest, I was surfing the net. Honest!" 8^)
In any case, I rarely have Javascript enabled (I've yet to see any use for it that makes it worthwhile, and plenty that make it a nuisance) and can't possibly imagine why an auction item would require Javascript to describe it.
The obvious solution to eBayla is to disallow Javascript in auction descriptions -- unfortunately I think the folks at eBay are too busy counting their money to actually do something to make the system better.
I just ordered the cheapy set of various distribs CD's from Linux Mall so I could play with (among others) Red Hat.
I guess I'll have to order the $1.89 Red Hat 6.0 once it comes out.
You can use the phone to talk about how bad the phone company is, even to make plans to blow up the local office. No worries. But if you actually carry out that plan...
Or, look at it this way: you pay for a certain amount of service. You use way more without paying for it. Your abuse causes other customers to lose access. You cause your provider to incur significant costs to clean up the mess. You are liable, regardless of what you used the excess services for.
I paid for a service. I had no choice in vendors, because NSI was given a governmentally approved monopoly. I can live with this; it was a necessary evil.
Now, however, according to the article at http://www.news.com/News/ Item/0,4,0-35228,00.html?st.ne.fd.mdh you plan on selling this data that I provided to you with the expectation of privacy. I hereby serve notice that if you sell my information to anyone at anytime, I will file suit immediately.
#1 meant MS-DOS, eliminating VB, Java, etc. #2 and #3 eliminated C, Perl, etc. QBasic was available, I knew it, you can do reasonably structured programming, and so on. It fit.
Since then, one of those projects has since been ported to Perl as a CGI script, but the code remains much the same.
Anyway, I'm not ashamed of my choice; It's a quick and easy language to work with, and fits the bill. There are no bad languages, only bad programmers. 8^)
See also http:/ /www.cis.ohio-state.edu/hypertext/faq/usenet/compi lers/free/part2/faq.html for a PL/M compiler, and http://home.sol.no/~egilk/download.html for a PL/M to C converter.
While you're at it, [Plug] check out my classic computers site and the Vintage Computer Festival.[/Plug]
COBOL (80%)
Powerhouse (12%)
Visual Basic (3%)
JCL/Scripts/Macros/Etc. (5%)
Home/Fun/Personal Web:
QBasic (MS-DOS) (45%)
Perl (45%)
Visual Basic (10%)
And before you laugh at me for being a COBOL programmer, keep in mind that I made a ton of money last year, working from home in the buff. So there. 8^)
This:
SUBTRACT ONE FROM WS-NUMBER-OF-CREDITS-REMAINING.
MOVE WS-NUMBER-OF-CREDITS-REMAINING
TO WS-DISPLAY-CREDITS-REMAINING.
PERFORM 4000-DISPLAY-CREDITS-REMAINING
THRU 4000-DISPLAY-CREDITS-REMAINING-EXIT.
could probably be done in a lot less lines in another language. Perhaps even one line, making for an 80% reduction in the number of lines of code.
Then, of course, there is the whole issue of efficiency -- writing more lines of code does not mean better code, or even more functionality.
P.S., Don't forget to check out the Vintage Computer Festival if you're interested in computer history (which, of course, has a direct bearing on the future of computers.)
I am proud to have in my collection Several significant tablet-type computers: the GRiDPad, the GRiD 2260 and 2270 (aka Convertable), Amstrad PDA600, a Telepad 3, and (soon) a Linux Write-Top.
For more on the history of pen-computing, see:
While I love books, and have hundreds (if not thousands), I have long felt that the advantages of reading electronic-based information has definite advantages -- the same ones we have come to take for granted with the web and other electronic references. (Things like hyperlinks to related material, in-line definitions, multi-media, and so on.)
In addition, the easy, familiar format of things like the GRiDPad, CrossPad, etc. lend themselves to quick replacement of the traditional pad of paper for note-taking, surveying, and other data entry. The ease of integrating remotely gathered data into centralized databases/references will ultimately make such devices commonplace.
In short, technology such as the WebPad, e-books, and CrossPad will be augmenting more and more everyday tasks, from taking notes in meetings, to compiling grocery lists, from street corner surveys to reading the latest news while climbing the stairmaster at the gym.
P.S., if anyone has examples of early tablets (such as those from Go, Momenta, Motorola, AT&T, etc.) or other older portable computers they want to find a new home for, please feel free to contact me!